Progress

So I'm sure you've been wondering about the state of our rec room. I mean, who doesn't worry about how other people's home improvement projects are coming along?

The last time I bothered blogging about it, I think it looked something like this:


That one's a little dark, but you still get the idea. What a mess!

But I'm proud to say, Craig has made lots of progress. It looks more like this now:

Ooh, look! A wall instead of a gaping hole! And it's even been spackled and sanded at least three times. Trust me.

More walls. Also spackled and sanded. Times three. But there's ALSO a new window there! Notice how pretty and clean and WHITE it is. So light. And it has double-paned glass. So insulated!
This picture is actually a bit old. Craig has also added trim around the window so it looks all finished now. If you don't believe me, come over and see for yourself!

All this means we've finally reached the very important step of choosing paint colors.

I know plenty of people who seem to walk into Lowe's, look at the paint chips for a bit, and choose their favorite color. Done. Craig and I don't work like that. We have a very complicated process that takes us days. But we're always happy in the end, so I'm okay with that.

The first step, which is sort of a pre-production sort of step, involves getting one of every single paint sample that we think we might possibly like. We take them home, and then the kids get their hands on them and scatter them all over the house. Then we repeat this a few more times.

Then we really begin.

The ACTUAL first step is to find some throw pillows or curtains or something that we like. Craig's theory, and it's a good one, is that you can match paint to pillows, but it's pretty tough to find pillows to match your paint. So we start with the accessories. This usually involves a trip to Target (although we have been known to check out Pier 1 Imports and a few other stores as well). We get pillows we like. And then we go back to Lowe's for another round of grab-every-possible-color-of-paint-chip. But this time we don't let the kids touch them. We flip through them all and choose the absolute favorites. And then we move to the rec room so that we're getting the correct lighting and we begin comparing.

At this point, it looks something like this:

We continue looking and comparing in daylight and at nighttime until we've finally chosen our favorites. This time, the colors we like are Foamy Sea (I love the name almost as much as I love the color) and Hopsack (less points for the name on that one, but the color was a perfect warm beige that I was looking for). And THEN, after this lengthy process, Craig finally gets to go and actually buy some paint. Whew!

So he is actually painting now while I'm sitting around blogging about it. The kids have small paint brushes and are "helping." I love three-day weekends.